


Wrong End of the Telescope

by livenudebigfoot



Category: Person of Interest (TV)
Genre: Foe Yay, M/M, Non-Explicit Sex, Stalking
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-09
Updated: 2013-01-09
Packaged: 2017-11-24 08:11:38
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,314
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/632302
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/livenudebigfoot/pseuds/livenudebigfoot
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Donnelly has a series of encounters with the Man in the Suit.</p>
<p>They aren't all bad.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Wrong End of the Telescope

**Author's Note:**

  * For [](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts).



> A post defending Donnelly on my blog became...passionate.

He has his first confirmed sighting from the ground, looking up: a figure dressed in neat, pressed black and white peering down at him from the top of the apartment building across the street from the one his men are sweeping in search of the man in the suit. Donnelly doesn’t want to jump to conclusions, not at this distance, not with what’s at stake here, but the figure keeps catching his eye and finally he turns to stare directly at it, squinting up into pale, dishwater sunlight. He might never have known for sure, but the figure leans out of the sunlight and points at Donnelly, and he doesn’t have to be up close and personal to recognize the gesture.

The figure makes a barrel of his pointer finger, a hammer of his thumb, and with a recoiling twitch of his hand and (Donnelly imagines) a whispered _pew pew_ like a child’s game, he shoots for Donnelly’s heart.

By the time he’s got his people in the right building, the roof is bare.

***

His second confirmed sighting is under different circumstances

He goes to the café a block from where he’s staying so he can take in some air for once, break away from the sour crush of the precinct and the musty claustrophobia of his hotel room, where he can’t take a step without his bare foot falling on laundry or pens or tumbleweeds of drifting newspaper clippings, each containing a likely incident, some little bit or fragment of a very dangerous man.

He likes working around people who don’t know what he’s doing. Their low, chattering hum makes his thoughts come easier, helps him lose himself in files and forget about his headache. There are distractions, city sounds, car exhaust, the occasional gust of wind that threatens to send his papers fluttering, but they are all surmountable. If he went to the trouble of coming down here, he can withstand them. It’s not as though he can get this in the hotel room.

A few days ago, he tried to open the window, only to find that they don’t open at all. In retrospect, he should have known. Of course the windows don’t open. Not here. Not this high up.

A small portal in his perceptions opens wide enough to let a cup of coffee in. He takes it in his hand but doesn’t try to drink, just lets the warmth seep through the porcelain and into the tight knots in his hand. His first sip is like a short kiss, breathing in the dark, careful not to burn himself.

The coffee is strong and bold and immediately he feels better, less like an automaton. His world tightens and sharpens and as he looks up at the busy street, it all seems so much clearer.

Specifically, he never ordered anything.

He turns quickly enough to spot a familiar man in a dark overcoat vanish up the sidewalk. The mug hits the tabletop face up with a clash and Donnelly is already leaving his files behind, vaulting the cord that borders the café’s outdoor tables and sprinting up the sidewalk, striking passersby with his shoulders until they start making a gap for him.

He has already dissipated into the crowd.

Donnelly returns to the café and picks up his mug between two gloved fingertips. At the lab, they find a fingerprint that’s a match for the ones that they already have.

Donnelly drinks precinct coffee from a Styrofoam cup and scowls bitterly at the board, daring someone to ask how it was that he came by the mug in the first place.

***

The first time Donnelly hears his voice, it’s a whisper somewhere deep in his phone and it goes like this: “Stand up.”

Donnelly, who is seated cross-legged on the floor of his room in the center of a web of disjointed clues, does nothing of the kind. “Who is this?”

“You know who I am. Stand up. Stretch your legs out a little. We’re not in a hurry.”

The voice is softer than he expected it to be. Donnelly stands. His knee crackles.

“Okay?” asks the voice.

“Fine,” Donnelly says between his teeth. Then, gentler, less grit, like the negotiators taught him, “Where are you?”

He chuckles. “Let’s go for a walk.”

Donnelly fumbles for shoes, instead finds the soft-soled leather moccasins that his sister gave him for Christmas one year or the other, the ones he keeps resolving to wear while he’s relaxing but never seems to get around to putting on. He slides them on and grapples with his coat, which is draped over the corner of his closet door. “Wherever you want,” he mutters into the phone as he clenches it between his ear and his shoulder.

The voice asks him to take the back stairs to what he guesses is the laundry, all gray concrete, and then guides him to a door which sends him blinking into an alley. From the alley, he goes to the street that his hotel is on, and from that street he walks to a smaller side street, and from there to an even smaller street, quiet and residential with flowers in the windows. “I’m not really in the mood for games,” Donnelly tells him, scanning every dark window, every gap between houses.

“This one will be fun,” the voice says, soothingly. “I promise.”

The journey the voice takes him on is winding, but not circuitous. He isn’t covering old ground again and again, praying for some new direction. He’s just being guided on a little tour of the city, the parts of it that he hasn’t seen yet and might never have seen. He’s passing through slums and markets and sweet little gentrified neighborhoods with the ugly history covered up. And all the while there’s a voice in his ear, speaking very deliberately, guiding his steps and telling him about what he’s seeing. This diner makes the best pecan pie you’ve ever had in your life. The kid who lives in that apartment with the Christmas lights strung across the window is the best computer programmer in the city, bar one. There was a gunfight last month in that nice little brownstone and you wouldn’t even know.

Donnelly becomes a walking machine, pounding the pavement with his sister’s moccasins and listening to that gentle, mesmerizing voice in his ear. He moves forward, always forward and wherever the voice tells him to, because he doesn’t know what else to do yet. He keeps an eye out. He asks questions. Questions about the voice get ignored and go unanswered. Questions about the stories the voice tells him are answered to the best of the voice’s ability, often with more stories.

The voice seems unused to speaking so much at one time, and by the end, it is scratchy.

The end comes when Donnelly realizes that he is once again on the street where his hotel is. “Were we ever going to meet?” he asks.

“No,” says the voice. “If I’m being honest, I just thought you could use some sun.”

“Did I see you?” he asks. “Could I have…were you even there, that whole time?”

He can hear the smile. “No,” the voice says. “You couldn’t have seen me. But I could see you every step of the way.”

Donnelly stumbles, presses one hand against the prickling wall of his hotel. “How?” he asks, dry-mouthed.

“Trade secret,” says the voice. “You should go upstairs and relax. Get some sleep. You can hunt me tomorrow.”

With that, the call goes dead.

Donnelly doesn’t get any rest. He traces the call and finds nothing. His moccasins are worn through and the soles of his feet are blistered.

The three hours he sleeps that night are the most satisfying he’s gotten in a long time.

***

For a long time, he neither sees nor hears from the man in the suit. But he does get samples of his handwriting.

The handwriting comes in notes that accompany the food that gets sent to him.

The food gets sent to him whenever he forgets to eat, which is often now.

It begins as takeout, comfort food. Chinese, Thai, bagels, coffee. After a while, it becomes actual meals, boxed up and brought to him from restaurants around the city. Fish and grains and fruits and vegetables.

“Brain food,” says the note.

Donnelly resents the dig at his intelligence, but he’s also very hungry and after the first few tox screens come back clean, he decides it doesn’t matter if he eats while waiting for the man in the suit to slip up.

With the meals, he never does.

***

This time, like the last several times, he doesn’t actually see the man. He just feels the bed beside him dip under a muscular weight and Donnelly shuts his eyes and grips the pillow.

“Wow,” says a familiar voice beside him. “I feel like it’s all eyes on me in here. With the newspaper clippings and all.”

“Now you know how I feel,” Donnelly tells him.

The man in the suit laughs. He sets his palm against Donnelly’s back and it burns warm through his cotton t-shirt. The hand begins to move in even strokes between his shoulder blades. “Aren’t you gonna take a look?” he asks, after a while.

Donnelly thinks. He screws his eyes shut tighter. He winces when warm breaths begin to puff against his ear.

“No,” he says, finally.

“But you want to.”

“More than anything.”

“Then why not?”

“You’ll leave,” Donnelly says. “Or I’ll catch you.” The back of his shirt is lifted and a calloused palm runs over his bare skin. “I think I’m afraid of what’ll happen, if I catch you.”

“I’ll go to jail,” the man in the suit says simply.

“You belong in jail.”

“I won’t argue.” Nimble fingers ease the drawstring of Donnelly’s pajama pants open and slide the waistband down just below his hips. The fingers start to trace around the smooth, sensitive skin there and it makes Donnelly’s stomach twitch. “Is that what you want? Me away in jail somewhere?”

“I don’t know,” he admits sleepily.

A sharp chin presses into Donnelly’s shoulder. “Well, sleep on it,” he says, easing Donnelly flat on his stomach and pressing down on top of him. “We’re not in a hurry.”

The man in the suits hands slide over him and the waistband of his pajama pants is now lost somewhere around his knees.

They have only spit to slick the way and it’s a bad stretch at first but they figure it out and with every jolt of the man in the suit’s hips, Donnelly makes himself relax, take it in, until that’s all he can do. He balls his fists up in the pillows and buries his face, hides his sharp gasp when the man in the suit begins to kiss at his back and shoulders, soft, ticklish brushes of dry lips becoming wetter.

The first time he cries out, the man in the suit kisses him. Covers his eyes, turns his head, and kisses him soft on the mouth. He does the same thing the second time Donnelly cries out, and the third.

By the time he figures out that the man in the suit likes noise, he is whimpering in a constant, unbroken thread into the man in the suit’s biting, needy mouth. There is a sweaty palm clamped over his eyes. Donnelly does not try to move it.

He comes so hard it’s almost unexpected and he falls heavy against the mattress, ready to pass out even as the man in the suit keeps right on moving inside him.

“Is this okay?” the man in the suit asks. “Should I stop?”

“Finish up,” Donnelly whispers brokenly.”Just finish up.”

He does. When Donnelly drifts off to sleep, the man in the suit is still inside of him.

***

He wakes up alone. He’d almost say it was a sick dream if the evidence wasn’t there in his sore muscles and his sticky belly.

He gets up and takes a shower; after that, he gets dressed and, feeling inspired, cleans the room. It breaks his heart to see the hard-won newspaper clippings balled up and in bins, but the bare walls bring with them a kind of serenity.

He opens the drapes for the first time in days. The sun is bright. He thinks that if he aimed his desk chair right and put enough force behind it, that window would open up one way or another.

Instead, he goes for a walk. He has a very good memory, so he knows which way to go. He goes to a diner, which someone told him makes the best pecan pie he’s ever had in his life.

He’s not sure about that.

It’s definitely top three, but the best isn’t so clear cut.

He doesn’t look up when someone joins him across the booth. There’s no point. He knows who it is. He’d know him anywhere now. Donnelly waits for the man in the suit to speak first.

Finally, he says, “Did I make a mistake?”

Donnelly takes a long thoughtful mouthful. “Doing what?” he asks.

“Sitting down with you,” the man in the suit says.

“No,” Donnelly reassures him. “No, you picked a good day. I'm going to continue my investigation into you tomorrow. I just need a day off to formulate a new approach. My old one was…stagnating. So,” he smiles, finds that his face is unused to it, “you happened to catch me on my day off.”

“Good. Ah. Thank you.” He drums his fingertips on the Formica tabletop. He asks, “Did you have plans?”

Finally, Donnelly raises his head.

The man in the suit is wearing jeans and a well-cut leather jacket. Somehow his nickname still fits.

Donnelly asks, “What did you have in mind?”


End file.
